He wouldn’t tell me who it was and I didn’t want to know He was innocent, you see. Impulsive. He was too… good for the dirty kind of fight we were in. He was drawn to the brightness of an ordinary tomorrow I remember now, he said, “A friend is someone who was once a stranger”. What could I do? What could I say? I said we had to find a sleeper, and that’s when I found out he’d broken another rule: he’d got married. I could have wept. Marriage is trust, and trust, in our game, was a weakness. And so I met Roza. She was to be the sleeper, he said. I could have wept again.’
He told Pavel to give her his ring. It’s the worst thing he’d ever said, but Father Kaminsky had an awful foreboding that something was about to go wrong. That Pavel would go out one night and she’d never see him again; that she’d be left with nothing… sacred. Because Pavel had opened the door to someone who hadn’t been picked; he’d shaken the hand of someone who wanted to meet the Shoemaker; he’d made a Friend out of a Stranger.
He’d trusted, thought Anselm, with feeling. He’d wanted to walk in an open field without walls and fences; he’d longed to stroll beneath an open sky without having to look where he was going. Roza had made an identical mistake.
‘The first I knew about the arrests was from Brack.’ Father Kaminsky’s cheeks were nicked here and there from clumsy shaving; a hand touched the healing cuts. ‘He was spitting rage… Pavel had set up a dummy meeting so when Brack moved in, he only caught Pavel and Stefan. Pavel had tried to patch up his mistakes. He’d tested the trust of the stranger. And he paid for it.’
Willingly as did Roza, thought Anselm. He thought of the figure in hiding for whom the sacrifice had been made; this man of vision and determination, kept safe by the dedication of his Friends. How did he bear the outcome?
‘He didn’t.’ Father Kaminsky’s head was shaking slowly right and left, his voice hoarse. ‘He lost the ability to speak. He couldn’t write a single line. Freedom and Independence died with those two young men.
Father Kaminsky was broken, too. He felt responsible because he hadn’t been put against the wall. This is what happens with deep friendship. Everything is shared. And he wanted to share death. But it wasn’t his task, his duty. His job was to survive. But how could he go on? It was as though the lights had gone out in his life. Doggedly he’d carried on working with the SB. He’d ‘informed’, diligently passing on the ideas of a new generation of intellectuals who’d tired of the broken promises for change. This had been his duty, and the reason for being alive: whoever had read those files had received messages of hope. The money? Given to the families of those imprisoned for what they believed.
‘Then, in nineteen eighty-two, Roza came back.’ Father Kaminsky’s wide eyes and open mouth showed the surprise had never faded. ‘I hadn’t seen her for thirty years, and here she was, strong and sure and… forgiving. She had a message for the Shoemaker from the widow of a Friend. The fight goes on, she insisted. Tell him he has no choice, she said; tell him the choice has already been made:
Father Kaminsky looked outside, turning away from remembered emotion. He stayed like that as if waiting for his train to arrive; waiting for the guard to carry his bags and find his seat; waiting for his big trip over the bridge.
Anselm knew the rest: it was a matter of history repeating itself Roza had made the same momentous blunder as Pavel. Eventually they’d both tired of deceit and caution, suspicion and doubt. They’d decided to live as human beings. They’d chosen to live by trust. They’d said, ‘Yes’ when they should have said, ‘No’.
‘When Brack saw me in the cemetery, he knew I was linked to Roza,’ said Father Kaminsky with the look of a man tired of delays.
Anselm was quizzical. It was All Souls. He was a priest. Being there had an innocent explanation.
‘One gesture.’ Father Kaminsky smiled, the jagged cracks in his skin turning supple. ‘After Roza was taken away I turned round and looked… and he saw the expression on my face. He saw how much I cared. The scales in his eyes came crashing down — scales carefully laid one upon the other for decades until he was blind — and I said, “Join us, won’t you? We’re going to win, eventually”, and he came right up close — ’ the old man leaned forward, aping the disbelief and confusion in Brack’s face, his thin arms rigid on the arms of his wheelchair — ‘and he replied, as if he were mourning, “I know you are. But don’t you see? Neither of us will join the celebrations.”‘
Of course they wouldn’t, thought Anselm. Brack had told Frenzel to name Father Kaminsky as his agent: to link him to a betrayal he could never explain away contaminating all the SABINA files in the SB archive. There and then, in the cemetery, he’d planned for Father Kaminsky’s future condemnation. He’d seen everything with frightening clarity and staggering speed.
They drank tea, Anselm eating the panettone, the old man struggling with the nougat. There used to be a wonderful shop in the Jewish Quarter that made poppyseed cakes bigger than the ones on the plate. A wall had been built twenty feet high. Children were smuggled out and hidden in homes and institutions. Father Kaminsky’s remembrances began to scatter. He moved back and forth in time, ‘they’ variously being the Nazis, the Soviets and the City Council. Brushing crumbs off his lap, he said, suddenly ‘Whoever betrayed Roza is trapped:
Anselm looked over the rim of his teacup.
‘That’s how Brack works. It’s how they made him.’
Anselm didn’t move.
‘Whoever it might be is trapped by their past.’ The old man was nodding his words again. ‘He did it to Roza and he did it to me. When you find them, don’t be too harsh:
The curate brought Anselm to the front door, wanting to know if everything had gone well. The exclusion was still eating away at his curiosity. He was staying with an unconfirmed legend, a man of rumour who wouldn’t tell any tales.
‘What did he say about his childhood?’ asked Anselm, gripping the Sun under one arm while he’d buttoned up his coat. Apparently the sports pages were muscular and without a trace of ambiguity; as for the leader page…
‘Not much, frankly’ The curate made a clucking noise, going over the dross. ‘Just that he’d been happy.’
Chapter Thirty-Six
John didn’t like the Dentist. He’d expected an ascetic, an intellectual with tortured eyes, one of the brains in the SB, whereas he’d been… what? Unconsciously vulgar? He’d wanted to impress, sporting handmade shoes and a stock-broker’s coat from Aquascutum. There’d been something wretched and lazy about his way of walking, as if he’d felt there wasn’t much point to sorting out the mess; as if there wasn’t much point to anything. The Dentist wasn’t what he’d seemed.
John’s shaking hand eventually got the key in the hole. The door yielded and he stepped into the flickering shadows of his flat. A projector clattered on the dining table, a roll of film unwinding from one spool to another. Images of tanks trundled across a sheet pinned to the wall. Soldiers tramped through the snow.
‘You’re late.’ Celina was hunched in the darkness, bent over a writing pad. Her hair was crazy, clipped back. Her glasses caught the sharp light. She was a wild cat in a wild night. John could just see the pencil moving. ‘What kept you? I’ve been worried.’
Do I love her? Or is it what she means to me? What she represents? Am I using her?
He drew back a chair and sat down, the projector whirring between them. ‘I got held up with a story.’
‘It’s always a story’
‘Yep, my life’s a story.’
She was everything he needed. A real dissident. Her father had been a mover in the Club of the Crooked Circle, a shaker in the Band of Vagabonds. He’d been a man of secret societies. An uncle on some side had rotted in a Tsarist prison. An aunt had been deported to Siberia and she’d died walking back. Celina’s mother had dumped the father because he wouldn’t swallow official ideology. She’d wanted the special hampers that came at Christmas for those who towed the line. She’d found a cleaner, sharper mind with access to the special shops where scarce goods could be bought at low prices. They were a family ripped apart by principle.
‘Have you eaten?’
‘I’m not hungry. What are you doing?’
‘I’ve got a meeting with the censor tomorrow I’m cutting out the best bits.’
